Pump up your mind

Knewton, the digital learning startup that just raised a $33 million series D, has announced a big partnership with one of its backers, Pearson. The duo hope to create a new kind of personalized education product. Knewton's tech will power Pearson's digital content and the pair will work together to make a new line of digital textbooks and coursework.

The strength of Knewton is its ability to deliver flexible education that adapts to the skills and pace of each student. “Knewton adaptive learning platform, as powerful as it is, would just be lines of code without Pearson,” said Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of Knewton. “You’ll soon see Pearson products that diagnose each student’s proficiency at every concept, and precisely deliver the needed content in the optimal learning style for each. These products will use the combined data power of millions of students to provide uniquely personalized learning to each.”

Pearson has the scale that Knewton craves. According to Erick Schonfeld Pearson reaches around 75 percent of the market in terms of digital higher education. That means Knewton will have access to a huge new set of user data that can help educate its algorithm on how best to educate students. The machines are learning!

Over the last year, reports the New York Times, the number of want ads for highly technical positions has nearly doubled on the industry job board AdExchanger. The wave of big data is rich soil for advertising companies to mine, but it requires some serious quants to seperate the signal from the noise.

“The demand has far outstripped the supply,” said Joe Zawadzki, chief executive of MediaMath, told the NY Times. “The number of things that you need to know is high and the number of people that have grown up knowing it is low.”

It's stories like this that inspired Union Square Ventures to participate in the $2.5 million funding round for Code Academy last week. The irony of our current economic climate is that persistent unemployment sits alongside a growing hunger for workers skilled in computer science.

Mayor Bloomberg's plan to build a new engineering campus in New York will help in the long term. But it can't hope to keep up with demand. In the meantime, a host of new programs like General Assembly and Code Academy are going to begin filling in the cracks with a new breed of education for the new economy.